


Dinner and a Show

by shefrommo



Series: Four Great Church-Bells (Starving Child) [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Eventually the Living Seals will talk, Exposition, Gen, Oliver has eating disorders, Part one of the Four Great Church-Bells (Starving Child) series, The first attack, and processes food super fast, but not the kind they teach you about in high school Health class, for now tho their meetings are hit and miss, he eats a lot because he's the Living Seal of Famine, so I guess that's more like food issues?, whatever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:21:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25195324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shefrommo/pseuds/shefrommo
Summary: 5,000 years ago, humanity staged a successful rebellion against their gods. Now, all that's left are four bells, a tablet containing a related prophecy, and four humans with monsters living under their skins.Oliver Contraire, reincarnation of Arin Leijona, is sitting at home and enjoying a snack when the first attack comes. He's utterly unprepared for the reappearance of the long-gone gods, but he's capable of fighting back. That's more than can be said for the victims of the attack, though, so he goes to help.Told from the perspective of the Starving Child
Relationships: Oliver Contraire | Arin Leijona & Ange Contraire, Oliver Contraire | Arin Leijona & Famine | The Horseman of the Apocalypse, Original Male Character & A Literal Force of Nature, Original Male Character & His Mom
Series: Four Great Church-Bells (Starving Child) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1825207





	Dinner and a Show

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you all enjoy!

Dinner and a Show  
Part one of Four Great Church-Bells (Starving Child)

When the first attack came, Oliver Contraire was sitting at home, ignoring his homework, and eating. The eating was a constant thing for him—he had a chronic case of hypermetabolism and was thus required to eat nearly absurd quantities of food just to survive each day. 

Oliver nibbled on the edge of his sandwich, making a face at the unpleasant combination of peanut butter and peach jelly. It wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever eaten—during his incarnation as Tarrare, he’d devoured some truly vile things in the name of survival—but was by no means the best thing Oliver had ever consumed. 

To distract himself from the sandwich, Oliver flipped on the television and started looking for the comedy channels. Instead, he came across a news station’s live feed of what appeared to be a large grey alien giant. At least, that’s what the reporter was calling it. She clearly didn’t know what she was seeing, but Oliver did.

He sat up and gawked at the sight of the god taking a swipe at a city. It was, as was usual for one of its race, granite gray and in possession of multiple limbs in places that limbs had no place being. It had five arms, two on the left and three on the right, with ten-fingered hands at the ends. More hands protruded from its ankles. Its mouth was settled on its left hip, taking the place of the missing sixth arm, and two pulsating lumps sat where its head should be. Its hearts were perched up there where nothing short of an airplane equipped with several bombs could harm them.

An airplane or a really big catapult, that was.

Oliver stuffed the rest of his sandwich in his mouth, checking to see where the attack was happening, before realizing that Paris was an hour and a half away from Provins, France. He wouldn’t make it in time to stop people from dying—and it wasn’t like Famine’s power was good for preventing deaths in the first place, anyway—but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still try.

As Arin Leijona, his original incarnation, he hadn’t had much of a choice in whether he’d join the War of Rebellion, but Oliver had learned a bit about duty over the years. More to the point, if the gods were back—and they were, unless this happened to be one big cosmic joke and that was a CGI monstrosity that only looked like a Geryon-type god—then there were no convenient armies of mages ready to fight back against the Geryon. Since the armies of mages were gone, that meant Oliver and the other three Living Seals were the only ones who could fight back. They were only ones with the _power_ to fight back. 

Arin had been the poor, confused child who’d been thrown in the deep end with no warning and no clue how to swim. Oliver remembered how it felt, staring up at the sealing circle he’d been thrown into, wondering if he was about to die like all the others, clearly enough to want to spare anyone else that creeping horror. And the Parisians in the line of fire wouldn’t even have an ocean of power with them to protect them, to fight back with, when the Geryon targeted them.

“Hey, Voice,” Oliver said, digging through his wallet and calculating how much train fare he’d need to get to Paris.

There was a sleepy stir somewhere inside of him, a feeling of awareness coupled with exhaustion thick enough to make Oliver yawn.

“Stop that,” Oliver complained. “I need all the motivation I can get right now.”

Behind him, his shadow turned gold, the gilt first circling the edges of Oliver’s shadow, then slowly slipping inwards, like a pond-ripple in reverse. Once Oliver’s entire shadow had brightened to gold, Famine rose from it, ox-skull covered in its own hood. The Horseman of Famine leaned forwards, draping its arms around Oliver’s shoulders and settling in for a snuggle.

“What?” Famine whined. “It’s too early. Let me go back to sleep, Jonah.”

“Oliver,” the auburn-haired human corrected, not for the first time. Famine had been calling him that since the Horseman had first figured out his name. Why it kept using the abbreviation of Oliver’s first incarnation’s surname rather than his first name was beyond Oliver. “And I’m not trying to wake you up, I just need to steal some of your power.”

“Your name was Jonah once,” Famine muttered petulantly. “And why do you need my power?”

“Once, like thirty bajillion years ago. That doesn’t count. At least use my old first name, Arin, if you must call me by a previous incarnation’s name,” Oliver rolled his eyes before turning serious and stuffing his wallet in his pocket. He probably had enough to take the train all the way to Paris but if not, that’s what his trusty catapult was for. He’d just have to find a boulder to weigh the other end down, that was all.

“It’s a scale, not a catapult,” the ox-headed Horseman mumbled, yawning again.

“If I jump on one end and drop something way heavier on the other end, then I go flying,” Oliver said cheerfully. “I’d say that’s close enough.”

He hurried out the door and towards the nearest train station, ignoring the way Famine floated along behind him and the slight itch that came from it digging through his memories to see why they were going to Paris.

“Oh,” Famine said finally. “The seals on the gods broke. No wonder we’re in a rush.” Despite the words, Famine still sounded rather lethargic, drained of energy, when Oliver knew it was anything but.

Oliver grinned to himself, feeling a rush of gratitude towards his prisoner for saying, “we.” He knew from previous conversations with the other Living Seals that not all of them got along with their Horsemen, Red Sun of Carnage being the only other one that had a positive relationship. Plague Doctor seemed to have finally transitioned from dislike to ambivalence towards Pestilence, and while Oliver had only ever met Cemetery Scholar once, the first Living Seal was _definitely_ in an antagonistic relationship with Death.

Oliver hopped over the curb, rushing across the intersection before the cars could start moving again. Famine vanished back into the gilded puddle of shadow at Oliver’s feet before anybody could see Oliver dodge around something that was blatantly not there—to them, at least.

The Horsemen tended to talk to their respective Living Seals, but that wasn’t indicative of wakefulness. They could—and almost always _did_ —do that while asleep. Oliver couldn’t quite remember the proper explanation for it, but over the years, he’d come to understand that the whole of the situation was rather like a multi-layered cake.

Earth, and both everything on it—such as humans, plants and animals—and the space around it—including the sun, all the other planets and galaxies, and literally every astronomical phenomenon observed by humans—sat on a single plane of existence. That plane of existence was metaphorically equivalent to one vanilla-flavored layer of the cake. Above and below them sat other layers, Hell and its demons below on a triple chocolate pudding layer, Underhill with all its Fae on the blueberry-and-orange flavored layer above, and so on and so forth. Somewhere far above the Fae’s blueberry-and-orange layer was a pistachio layer from which originated the eldritch abominations that had once fooled humanity into thinking they were legitimate gods.

If each plane of existence was a layer on the cake and the cake made up all of reality, then the Horsemen of the Apocalypse were the icing on the cake, ever present and a threat to everyone, regardless of the cake layer from which they came. Too much of the Horsemen icing, and the cake was ruined, the flavors overpowered. Too little, and it wasn’t a proper cake because the lack of death and conflict, of change and scarcity, would remove all that made life so precious.

The Horsemen had more in common with computers than they did with icing, however. Like a computer, they used up power doing stuff. A computer used more power when it was awake than it did when it was asleep, and similarly the Horsemen radiated more power when they were awake and used far less when they were asleep.

The problem was that when all four Horsemen were Awake—properly awake, not just tired and complaining about the disturbance to their beauty sleep—they would destroy the plane of existence their physical bodies were on. That was where the “apocalypse” in their names had come from.

Again, too much icing, and the cake was ruined.

Famine had admitted that it and its siblings would continue to Awaken and destroy the planes of existence until all planes had been destroyed, but they could be kept asleep to forestall that. And luckily, unlike a computer, a simple shake wouldn’t wake them.

Both humans and the Horsemen had four stages of sleep. The first was the transition from wakefulness to sleep, the stage that everyone referred to when they said they were only “half-asleep.” The second was where the body spent most of its time, either relaxing muscles and switching off nerves in preparation for the transition to the next stages or reversing the process in preparation for awakening. The third was what was needed to feel well-rested when awake, and the fourth was what human scientists called REM sleep and was where dreams happened. The Horsemen called this stage Deep Sleep. 

The Horsemen spent most of their time in Deep Sleep. However, when events conspired to draw them closer to awakening, such as an epidemic for Pestilence or a continental food shortage for Famine, they would transition very slowly to the earlier, higher stages of sleep. As they made this transition, they would radiate more power, becoming increasingly dangerous. Even if their respective Horsemen were Awake, the Living Seals like Oliver acted as a failsafe, preventing this power from leaking into the rest of the world in such great quantities that the apocalypse was possible.

Of course, there had never been a time when all four Horsemen were Awake at once, not while the Living Seals had been imprisoning them. The closest they had come was two-and-three-quarters, back during the War of Rebellion.

Both War and Pestilence had been fully Awake when they’d been sealed, hence why Red Sun of Carnage’s formal identification was War- _119_ -S and Plague Doctor’s was Pestilence- _196_ -S. Red was the stable one hundred and nineteenth seal of War, and War rarely outright killed its failed seals. War-1-F through War-118-F had all more or less died because they’d been driven insane by exposure to War. While stuck in the throes of incoherent bloodlust, they’d forget to eat and drink, and instead went for the throats of anyone who tried to feed them. Eventually they had either starved to death or died of dehydration or simply, for lack of any better targets to maul, chewed through their own tongues and subsequently drowned in their blood.

Doc on the other hand, despite becoming the third Living Seal, was the stable one hundred and ninety-sixth seal of Pestilence. Pestilence tended to give its failed seals deadly diseases, and back when people were still signing up to be failed seals, there was no treatment for the Bubonic Plague. So, Pestilence’s failed seals tended to die more quickly than War’s did, which was why Doc was the 196th seal; whereas, Red who was declared a successful seal before him was only the 119th.

Death, however, was three-quarters of the way to wakefulness when the War of Rebellion ended and had been sealed first. Cemetery Scholar was Death-423-S and had been part of the Absinthe cult in Atlantis, back when there still _was_ a cult. Rumor had it that the cult had ended explosively during one of Scholar’s tests to see how much power he could draw from Death. Rumor also had it that the Absinthe, having been the ones to first come up with and test ways to seal the Horsemen and harness their power, killed massive amounts of people in the pursuit of stolen power.

Considering the fact that Scholar was the 423rd seal and the only real success, that part of the rumor probably had basis in fact. Whether or not the whole “killing non-cult members for trying to steal the secret to the seal” was true was up for debate. 

In comparison, Famine had been in the Deep Sleep for the entirety of the War of Rebellion. Consequently, Oliver himself was Famine-35-S, nicknamed Starving Child. By that point, the seal-workers who set up the seals had figured out that when Scholar had said, “The attempted vessel cannot have magic in any way or form,” he hadn’t been joking. Far fewer people would have died in the War and Pestilence sealing attempts had they originally paid attention to Scholar’s warning. Thus, when they began to seal the second-youngest Horseman, they started with people lacking magic.

Arin Leijona had been one of a series of kids grabbed off the streets to use as vessels. The seal-workers crafting his seal hadn’t actually expected him to survive—knowing that Famine was the sole Horseman asleep meant that the seal-workers had been willing to sacrifice as many people as it took to partially awaken the ox-headed Horseman. Its siblings had proved willing to negotiate once they were spoken to politely. They hoped that Famine would oblige them as well.

Unfortunately for their plans to seal Famine inside an agreeable host—read, one that wouldn’t have any problems with being the penultimate success when all their predecessors were slaughtered children—Famine ‘woke’ early. It vaguely remembered being told about the seals by its older siblings, Death and War, and its younger sibling Pestilence. Thus, when it was sealed within a panicking Arin, Famine had reached out and talked him through stabilizing the seal. As soon as Arin’s seal was stable, Famine had drifted back into the Deep Sleep, where it had remained for the duration of the War of Rebellion. That had left Arin as Famine-35-S, much to the dismay of the amoral idiots who’d decided to use a nine-year-old street urchin as a sacrificial lamb. Arin had taken great joy in forcing his would-be killers to feed him an unending supply of food.

At any rate, the Horsemen spent most of their time asleep but were still capable of talking to others. How they did so was a strange mix of dream-walking and astral projection. They were asleep and projected themselves into someone else’s head, so on their end, it was dream-walking. On the other hand, they weren’t necessarily limited to doing that to people who were dreaming. While it was dream-walking from the visitor’s point of view, to the visited—in this case Oliver—it was more along the lines of astral projection. Of course, to anybody who wasn’t being visited, the visited person was hallucinating an imaginary friend and talking to thin air.

That wasn’t to say that the Horsemen were limited to talking to only their Living Seals. No, they were perfectly capable of talking to others. They just didn’t bother to all that often. Usually, if they weren’t talking to their Living Seal, their mostly eternal companion, the four siblings were talking to each other. Before the Living Seals had come along, the Horsemen communicated almost exclusively with each other. 

“Olly, olly, oxen free,” Famine hummed, and tapped a bony knuckle against Oliver’s ankle.

Oliver startled a little, glancing down at it, only to find that under his feet was Famine’s head, its empty eye-sockets aimed to look Oliver in the eyes as best it could. Oliver swallowed the urge to stand on its horns. That would look odd to everyone else in sight, and in the wake of the Geryon attack in Paris, they probably wouldn’t be too excited to see Oliver float a tenth of a meter off the ground.

“Pay attention,” Famine said, “I believe that the crosswalk is not open for this corner. At least, nobody seems to be crossing in the direction you’re intending on going, but they’re walking across the street perpendicular to your path.”

Oliver looked up to see that the crosswalk was indeed closed for pedestrians, and he’d have to wait for the light to change.

While he waited impatiently, Famine had another complaint to deliver, “I know that you’re determined to reach the train and leave on time, but the train takes an hour and a half to get to Paris. Then you’ll still have to find your way from the Gare de l’Est station to wherever it is in Paris that the Geryon is. You should buy some food before we get on the train. We haven’t eaten in _minutes_ , I know you didn’t finish your post-school snack, and the mere thought of all that food you left at home is making me hungry.”

Oliver very carefully didn’t verbalize the thought that Famine had no room to talk, seeing as its presence in his body, chained to his soul, was what had resulted in Oliver having hypermetabolism and hyperphagia. He knew for a fact that he’d gained the two issues after Famine had been sealed inside of him.

“Excuse me,” somebody said politely, and Oliver looked up to see a girl with glasses looking at him.

“Yes?” Oliver asked.

“You have a point about me giving you metabolic issues,” Famine said plaintively, “but consider my point. I am Famine, Starvation Incarnate, and yet you’re making me noticeably hungrier than I already was.”

“I just wanted to say that those are really cool contacts you have on,” the girl said. “Would you mind it if I took a picture of them? I’m trying to convince my mom to let me get colored contacts instead of glasses. I’m making an album of all the coolest ones.”

“This is my natural eye color, actually,” Oliver said, “but okay.” He leaned forwards so that she could get a better picture of his eyes.

As the girl snapped a picture, she said, “What, really? You have gold eyes naturally?”

“They’re amber,” Oliver corrected. “Or honey colored, depending on whom you ask. Personally, I prefer amber because that sounds cooler.”

“Wow,” the girl said and then took a step back, phone in hand. “That’s really cool.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Oliver said cheerfully.

“Weren’t your eyes brown before you became my Living Seal?” Famine asked amused.

 _Hush_ , Oliver thought at it. That was irrelevant; nobody beyond Oliver remembered what his eye color had been before Famine had dyed his eyes as gold as its robe. As far as anybody was concerned Oliver’s eyes were amber and always had been.

5,000 years’ worth of families would attest to that. As would every birth and death certificate he’d accumulated since the paperwork had been invented, seeing as Oliver was reincarnated every few decades and his birth generated just as much paperwork as any other birth did.

Not that anybody else was aware of that little fact. The Living Seals had been alive more than long enough to have lived through the various Witch Hunts. They were all savvy enough to know that if people were crazy enough to kill others over a couple of spoiled buckets of milk and some moldy bread, a la the Salem Witch Trials, then they definitely wouldn’t take well to knowing that the Living Seals reincarnated as a consequence of chaining the forces of nature to their souls.

Oh, sure, people of the current day liked to pretend that they were past the barbarity of religious fanatics burning to death all sorts of innocent women whose only crimes were extrapolated from coincidence and a few facial warts. That wasn’t true though. People had been saying they were past that sort of barbarity eighty years ago and look at what Hitler had been doing at the same time. 

Just then, Oliver’s phone rang. Startled, he fished it out and promptly winced when he saw that it was his mom calling. Answering it, he said, “Hey—”

“Oliver Philippe Contraire, _where on earth are you_?” his mom said frantically.

“Getting a train ticket, why?” Oliver asked, even though he had a feeling he knew why. It probably had to do with the fact that a large part of Paris was just destroyed by a Geryon god and she came home to find her fourteen-year-old son missing.

“You’re buying a train ticket? A train to where?”

“To uh…actually, can I not answer that?”

“Oliver, where on earth do you think you’re going?”

“…to the destroyed section of Paris,” Oliver mumbled sheepishly. This was his least favorite part of being reborn as a kid: being treated like a helpless kid. He hated being treated like a kid, period. Even the others tended to treat him like a kid. Their nickname for him was even _Kid_ , same as how he called them Red and Doc and Scholar.

“Absolutely not,” Ange Contraire said. “You’re at the train station here, right? Stay right there. I’ll come and get you.”

“But, mom, I need to help!”

“Leave the reconstruction to the professionals.”

“No, I meant help fight that thing that destroyed the city.”

“You’re fourteen, what would you do against something that could use the Eiffel Tower as a walking stick? Anyway, it’s already left.”

Oliver stopped short and gave Famine a wide-eyed look. “It has?”

“Yes, just under an hour ago. It vanished into the air just as soon as it came. Go sit outside of the station. Don’t you _dare_ get on that train.”

Oliver hesitated a moment, then said, “Give me a second.” Rather than leave the station, he did a quick Google search to see if the Geryon had really left. When he saw that it had indeed departed, he turned around and exited the station.

“I’m waiting outside,” Oliver said. “I can walk home.”

“No,” Mom said, “stay there and I’ll pick you up. For God’s sake, Oliver, what were you thinking? You didn’t even text or leave a note! I came home to find half your lunch scattered across the table. Did you think I wasn’t going to notice?”

Oliver cringed and curled in on himself, huddling against the wall next to the station’s entrance as he waited out the tirade. Famine reached up and gave him a sympathetic pat on the arm, before covering him in what started out as a hug and ended as an attempt to either smother Oliver or use him as an improvised mattress.

**Author's Note:**

> Hypermetabolism is defined as: "...an abnormally high intake of calories followed by continuous weight loss."
> 
> Hyperphagia is defined as: "...is an abnormally strong sensation of hunger or desire to eat often leading to or accompanied by overeating."
> 
> Tarrare "...was a French showman and soldier, noted for his unusual appetite and eating habits. Able to eat vast amounts of meat, he was constantly hungry[.]"
> 
> The above quotes were taken from Wikipedia.


End file.
